 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on theories of international migration. And today I will discuss labour market segmentation theories which explain why migrants get attracted to certain destination countries. Labour market segmentation theories are actually theories that also debunk one of the biggest myths one could say that exist on international migration, namely that international migrants would take away jobs from natives which also explains why we have certain hostilities sometimes against migrants in some destination societies. And to understand why this is not the case and why migrants move, we have to look at the distinction that has been made by sociologists particularly in the seventies between formal capital intensive segment of the labour market and the informal labour intensive segment of the labour market. So labour market segmentation approaches, they generally depart from the idea or start from the idea that the labour market can be divided into two main segments. On the one hand you have this formal capital intensive segment which is the primary labour market, that's also a name that they often give to this, which means that this is the segment of the labour market where you have stable jobs, where you have good salaries, where you have a lot of social security. So these are the jobs that many people want to have one could say. And then secondly we have the informal labour intensive part of the labour market, the secondary labour market. And this is where we see much more manual work for example, lower salaries, not a lot of security, also very dangerous conditions sometimes where people have to work in when you get fired, you don't have any insurance that can cover up for your lost expenses. So there is a big difference between the primary formal and the informal or the secondary segment of the labour market. So that is a basic sociological idea that Marxist sociologists in particular put forward and they say that is something that we can find in many different labour markets around the world because they say the secondary segment of the labour market is important because with kind of discriminatory short term contracts where you don't have to pay people for endless periods of time once they get fired, the capitalist economies have a reserve army that they can kind of simply dismiss once the economy goes down and which they can then again use to attract once the economy is going up. And then you have Michael Piore who wrote a book Birds of Passage which was published in 1979 and he indicated that actually this segmented labour market idea is applicable to international migration because he indicates the local population very often is not willing to do the jobs in the secondary segment anymore. Think about the guest worker period after the Second World War when we had a lot of jobs that became available in the mines, in the metal industries, very heavy industries, very physical intensive jobs, very bad for your health. The local population which was increasingly educated did not want to have these jobs anymore. But so migrants very often are willing to take the jobs in the secondary labour market because for them the pay anyhow is higher compared to the pay that they would have at home and so for them it's an interesting thing to do to move to the secondary labour market of another country. And so according to Michael Piore and other segmented labour market theorists migration exists because of the existence of the secondary labour market whereby migrants get systematically exploited but because of the fact that there is this income differential still the secondary labour market is very interesting and attractive for them to move towards. So that in a nutshell is what segmented labour market theory is about. I hope you enjoyed this knowledge clip.